Intuit is spending $7.1 billion for competitor Credit Karma

Intuit has made a deal to acquire Credit Karma. Credit Karma is perhaps best known for an app for checking on your credit score. Intuit is a direct competitor with its own Credit Score monitoring app and is buying its most successful competitor. What’s more Credit Karma has been offering a free tax filing service since 2017, which would pull potential customers away from TurboTax. Intuit with its Turbo Tax service is known for hiding its free service deceptively and pushing users to its paid tiers.

There are serious consequences of this merger and I can’t help but draw a parallel to the T-Mobile/Sprint merger. You have one company buying its next closest competitor and it even came out that T-Mobile executives talked about raising prices after the merger. You can see how the Credit Karma acquisition will play out, one less free option on the market for doing taxes or at least one that is so controlled by Intuit that most people feel compelled to upgrade to a paid tier. Another consequence is that anyone who is a Credit Karma customer will have their personal financial data handed over to a company that they didn’t intend to give it to in the first place.

Credit Karma was founded in 2007 and was well known for offering services for free. It made its money from receiving a fee when it referred a customer to a credit card or another financial service all while promising that its services “will always be free.”

By Platform De.Central